In your opinion, what movies did you enjoy more than the book?
I'll go first and say Starship Troopers.
I watched the film, and loved it for the tongue in cheek satire on fascism and over-militarisation that it was.
Read the book....and ended up putting it down almost halfway through because it was so...Disagreeable. (immature I know, but I found it hard to read something that presented fascism as a legitimate way to run stuff, i mean, come on, it was fairly propagandtastic)
Well it's the only one that I have read and watched (I know of others like "Die Hard" but I never read the book) so I have to go with it.
I saw the movie first. I knew the book was very different from the movie but I didn't realize HOW different it actually was. It was very very very different. Really...except for the book title and the bugs being in both, they are two very different pieces of work. I loved the movie; I didn't hate the book but I was really bored with it and wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
EDIT:
Oh! I have one that will anger everyone because that's what I do (want to hear how much I like the ending of Mass Effect 3; that's always fun )
"The Walking Dead" TV Show is better than the graphic novel. The graphic novel is very weirdly paced. It's all over the place in terms of what's going on and what the characters do. My best example of this has always been the handling of Shane.
Shane goes from "Hey, we're best friends aren't we Rick!!?" to "MURDER!!!!" in about two pages. I don't know who this guy is and why he goes freaking insane so damn quickly. The show slow-burned the hell out of this, going TWO full seasons of tension and character development before Rick finally kills Shane
A lot of people HATE how slow the TV Show is (especially compared to the Graphic Novel) but I absolutely love the pace of the show. The thing the novel does have on the show is that it's willing to take out main characters like "Game of Thrones" but they recycle through them so quickly that it really didn't matter all that much to me. The TV Show, while keeping main characters alive longer, make me care a LOT more when one of them does finally bite the dust.
NOTE: I have only seen what's on Netflix so maybe the show takes an absolute nose-dive past season 3 but I've been hearing how much everyone hates the show way before that so I doubt it matters to me. However, please don't spoil it for me past that point since that makes me cry
As I said last time this thread popped up, I found the Lord of the Rings movies to be miles better than the books. I'll give Tolkien all the credit in the world for all of the creative work he did to craft such a full and believable universe.. but I've always found him to be a terrible writer. The LOTR books make me want to find excitement elsewhere by watching paint dry, but the movies took that world /story Tolkien created and actually made it enjoyable and interesting.
There's Blade Runner. The original book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is a fantastic story, and so is Blade Runner, for different reasons and in different ways. I don't know if it's better but I like them both.
The Big Sleep is easier to follow in its original novel form but the movie (the 1946 version) more or less cemented everything I've come to love about film noir and femme fatales and Humphrey Bogart. Again, not necessarily better, but good in ways the book never really even tried to explore.
Can we count To Kill a Mockingbird? I mean, the book's good and stuff, but that's a fantastic movie. I doubt considering the movie better is a popular opinion, though. I liked it more (but then I like film more as a general rule, so).
Can we count To Kill a Mockingbird? I mean, the book's good and stuff, but that's a fantastic movie. I doubt considering the movie better is a popular opinion, though. I liked it more (but then I like film more as a general rule, so).
As I said last time this thread popped up, I found the Lord of the Rings movies to be miles better than the books. I'll give Tolkien all the credit in the world for all of the creative work he did to craft such a full and believable universe.. but I've always found him to be a terrible writer. The LOTR books make me want to find excitement elsewhere by watching paint dry, but the movies took that world /story Tolkien created and actually made it enjoyable and interesting.
I agree. I loved the Hobbit, then when I went on to read Lord of the Rings it took me several attempt to finish them. They're just so God damned slow and tedious.
I'll throw A Clockwork Orange out there. Only because reading the book involves wading through an ocean of incomprehensible Cockney rhyming slang, otherwise it's a fantastic book.
Watchmen.
Watchmen the comic breaks the cardinal rule of any visual medium: Show, don't tell. All it does is tell. It's less a comic, and more a picture-book.
...The psychic-alien-clone-brain-vagina-squid-thing. Instead opting for a more believable scenario of making it look like Dr. Manhattan did it.
"The Walking Dead" TV Show is better than the graphic novel. The graphic novel is very weirdly paced. It's all over the place in terms of what's going on and what the characters do. My best example of this has always been the handling of Shane.
Shane goes from "Hey, we're best friends aren't we Rick!!?" to "MURDER!!!!" in about two pages. I don't know who this guy is and why he goes freaking insane so damn quickly. The show slow-burned the hell out of this, going TWO full seasons of tension and character development before Rick finally kills Shane
The reason for the handling of Shane was the book wasn't hugely popular yet and there was a real possibility of cancellation so Kirkman wanted to reach the ending to the Shane arc before the book was potentially forced to end. Kirkman has said in the past that he is unhappy with how quickly he ended Shane's part of the story and was glad to have a second chance with the TV show.
I actually preferred the Lord of the Rings movies to the books. This was mostly due to how much I dislike Tolkein's writing style, and I felt the movies started showing better structure by The Two Towers. Sure, the books had a more interesting world, and we can argue all day about character development, but, at least to me, Tolkein was just not that great of a writer, and the otherwise great world and story suffered for it.
There's Blade Runner. The original book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is a fantastic story, and so is Blade Runner, for different reasons and in different ways. I don't know if it's better but I like them both.
I also think A Scanner Darkly was a better movie than it was a book. A lot of Philip K. Dick's books are like that - they transfer very well to the big screen. It's something about the simple way in which he wrote, I bet it just makes it really easy to flesh out into a script and still retain all of the original message, but with the added benefits of some nice visuals, atmosphere and human faces. A lot of book to film adaptations tend to lose something along the way. Not so for his works - they're written in a movie-like pace to begin with and they only seem to gain from the adaptation, become something even more. When I read the In Memoriam... at the end of the book, I was pretty sad. But when I saw it at the end of the movie I fucking cried (hey don't judge, I lost some friends to heroin).
Total Recall is another good example, though I'm cheating a bit because it's based on a short story. It's a cheesy take but it works wonderfully.
He's one of my favourite authors and usually while I'm very skeptical about film adaptations, I actually like the idea of seeing more of his books made into movies. Unless, of course, they place Tom Cruise as the lead actor. That rat faced clown can fuck anything up >.>
Ok most of these are movies that are on par with the books because it's rarer for me to find a movie better than the book with how much I read
I liked To Kill A Mockingbird more than the book (though I do really like the book) and A Clockwork Orange (and even with the cockney rhyming and all that I still really enjoyed it).
How about Hellraiser? The first movie. It is basically the book in movie format. Very few things changed and those that did didn't detract it from the storyline (the book was The Hellbound Heart). Though I might be biased as I'm just a huge Clive Barker fan for both books and movies....
Does this go for musicals that are on dvd/blu ray as well? Cause if so, Love Never Dies was soooooo much better than The Phantom of Manhattan. Dear lord that was a terrible book.
*looks through books I've read list on goodreads*
The original movie of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was just as good as the book for me (not the newest one that came out I didn't care much for it)
James and the Giant Peach and Matilda were good movie wise and book wise
How about plays?
Because I do enjoy reading plays but Hamlet was best with Patrick Stewart in it. And Romeo and Juliet was good (one of the older ones that I saw in high school). And A Midsummer's Nights Dream.
Frankenstein was pretty good too for being a movie adaptation.
Trainspotting was....a very weird book and a fairly decent movie but I'm not sure I can really compare them like most other things considering all the different perspectives the book was written in as compared to the one perspective in the movie.
Fight Club was a better movie for me than book.
The older movie of The Great Gatsby was better than the book for me though I do love both fairly equally most of the time
The Odyssey made a pretty good movie (though I do quite like the epic better most of the time)
Misery was an amazing movie but the book I wanted to tear in half and burn
P.S. I Love You was a better movie than it was a book
The Secret Garden, while being a good book, was a great movie
The Lord of the Flies was another movie that was a little better than the book but in which I enjoyed both
And that's all I have that I've seen and read off the 36 pages of my read books on goodreads. I've read more books that have been made into movies but a majority of them I haven't seen the movies. The ones I have seen have been decent adaptations for the most part but not better than the books. I can't consider any of the Twilight saga in this considering the books were a joke and so were the movies and I can't tell which was a bigger joke. And I haven't seen the host yet which was a decent book for Meyer so...*shrugs*
The book is a preposterous, tedious, boring trek all over the desert, whereas the movie is fast paced, fun filled and a rollicking adventure ride, with treasure hunting and environmental awareness to boot.
I enjoyed the Hunger Games movie better than the book, the visuals were fairly interesting, I think it was paced better, but most of all it cut out most of the angst from the book. Can't speak for Catching Fire as I haven't read it nor seen it.
Uh... Goodfellas... Big Fish... Most of those Disney-produced movies that I didn't know were based on a book... And, weirdly, The Polar Express, because before I saw it the first time, I though that it would have ruined a classic book for me... (Boy, was I fucking wrong!)
Also, now that I think about it, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs made more sense than the book, in my opinion... and I agree with tippy with The Walking Dead more than i'm willing to admit right now...
Y'know what? I'm gonna go ahead and say absolutely every film adaptation of Alan Moore's work, with the possible exception of League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Yeah, that's right; I'm including V for Vendetta.
The big complaint that everyone levels at the movie is that it does away with the comic's moral ambiguity. Perhaps; V is pretty clearly the "good guy" in the fight against Norsefire. But this criticism loses me in two places:
1) V is still shown to do horrible things for his cause, and the audience is hardly asked to overlook them; they're just not bashed over the head with a big knobbly stick engraved with the message "Hey! This conflict is looking mighty MORALLY AMBIGUOUS! V might not be the hero! Deep, no?" as they are in the comic.
2) Let's face it- from any objective standpoint, V is the lesser evil in either version. In a world as miserable as the one perpetuated by Norsefire, human life is simply not worth living, fuck the fact that more people get to live it. Physical survival will never be worth freedom. V's strategy of "Fuck up the government and whatever happens afterward happens" is shortsighted and irresponsible, but it's still better than a fascist dictatorship- at least someone more sensible might crawl out of the rubble and start rebuilding.
Oh, yeah, and as mentioned above,
Fake Alien Vagina-squid < Framing Doctor Manhattan
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